He was looking out over New York.
Twenty years before he had faced it, asking of it nothing but a living and his freedom. For twenty years he had fought. Year by year, even when he seemed to be standing still or going backward, he had steadily gained, making each step won a vantage-ground for forward attack. And now—victory. Power, wealth, fame, all his!
Yet a deep melancholy came over him. And he fell to despising himself for the kind of exultation that filled him, its selfishness, its sordidness, the absence of all high enthusiasm. Why was he denied the happiness of self-deception? Why could he not forget the means, blot it out, now that the end was attained?
His mind went out, not to Marian, but to that other—the one sleeping under the many, many layers of autumn leaves at Asheville. And he heard a voice saying so faintly, so timidly: “I lay awake night after night listening to your breathing, and whispering under my breath, ‘I love you, I love you. Why can’t you love me?’” And then—he flung down the cover of his desk and rushed away home.
“Why did I think of Alice?” he asked himself. And the answer came—because in those days, in the days of his youth, he had had beliefs, high principles; he had been incapable of this slavery to appearances, to vain show, incapable of this passion for reputation regardless of character. His weaknesses were then weaknesses only, and not, as now, the laws of his being controlling his every act.
He smiled cynically at the self of such a few years ago—yet he could not meet those honest, fearless eyes that looked out at him from the mirror of memory.
He was triumphant, but self-respect had gone and not all the thick swathings of vanity covered him from the stabs of self-contempt.
“When I am really free, when the paper is paid for and I can do as I please, why not try to be a man again? Why not? It would cost me nothing.”
But a man is the sum of all his past.